What comes through is the sense of a unique group of men who were both brilliant and human. Their level of education and sophistication was unequaled in the history of that time. There was also a remarkable balance of personalities from the thoughtful to the ambitious. Their personalities played off well against each other and led to the many compromises that would ultimately define our system of government.

On the way in to work this morning, I was thinking about how fortunate they (we) were that the system was based on a Federal model with a collective of semi autonomous states. This grew out of the colonial system that the British had put in place. This model in turn allowed for the great Western expansion of the United States in the 19th century. Strong local governments were an absolute necessity in the administration of such a large geographic area. Money and order would flow from the Federal Government but day to day governance would be at the state level where it was manageable and controllable by the citizens of each state. It would lead ultimately to a wide cross-pollination of developing ideas and a long term balancing of interests. If something worked in one state, the others took it up. If there was a really bad idea (slavery being the most egregious) it could not stand against the pressures of the other states or was not adopted.

Most of the systems that the Founding Fathers put in place have served us well, partly because they turned out to be somewhat flexible. The one component that now seems clearly out of sync with the 21st century is the Electoral College. That one needs to go.

My wife spent most of last week decorating our house. The usual big tree has been up since the Friday after Thanksgiving. The bushes that run the length of the front of our house are covered with the requisite white mini lights. The living room mantle, the stair rail, and all of the tables in the living room are covered with Christmas stuff.

I used to love decorating for Christmas when I was a kid. A particular joy was bringing out the special ornaments and lights. My wife has reduced all of this to tasteful if slightly boring. She agonizes over getting just the right placement for each new trinket she buys and I am frequently called upon to offer an opinion. I hate that, mostly because I really don't care. My daughter and I would like to have some colored lights on the Christmas tree, but that has long been declared a fashion no-no by the Decorator-In-Chief. The only color my wife will allow is white.

I do still love the sounds of Christmas; the carols on the radio, the clanging bells of the Salvation Army bucketeers at the stores, the shy whispers of children offering their choices to the mall Clauses.

A big section of our neighborhood puts on a display Christmas Eve. The neighbors line the streets with candle lit luminarias to attract great crowds of by passers to their brightly lit houses. It is something of a well-lit fantasyland and I do enjoy driving by.

I do in the end like all of the Christmas decorations. They tend to warm up an otherwise dreary time of the year. I guess that as I get older, the balance between decking the halls and the trouble of stringing all of those lights, ornaments and the tangle of power cords tips in the direction of leaving all of it boxed up in the storage cartons and trunks. Maybe if we just went one year without it, my enthusiasm would all come back.

Perhaps it is the anticipation we built up for the millennial change. 2000 was to be such a big event. Our computers were supposed to all crash. A new age, the E age was dawning. There was to be an exciting presidential election. All of these have turned out to be non-events.

The clock rolled over and the world did not shut down from some huge cyber crash. The E age is in a bit of a slump just now (it is here but like all new ages is now in the throws of trying to grow up). The Presidential election turned out to be the most boring I have experienced. The whole thing has turned into an ugly fight over less than 1000 votes in one state.

There are just not a lot of major issues that the general public is excited about. The abortion issue still seems to be able to arouse some passion, but if you look at the polls, there is a virtual tie on that issue too.

Ties are not necessarily a bad thing. They would seem to signal that the public is pretty content with things the way they are and do not want much change. We seem to have evolved an economic system that takes care of most of us. The dept is going down for now at least. The world is basically a peace except for the Middle East and no one knows how to solve that anyway.

Even we few non-closeted Liberals do not seem to have much of an agenda just now. We have come to the conclusion that government has gone about as far as it can productively go to solve the ills of our society. We should have some passion about the environment but issues like global warming are a little too abstract for us. We will have to face that sooner or later but it is happening so slowly (at least in human terms) that we are not able to focus on it. Ending or actually reversing global warming will have a heavy price in terms of our lifestyle and we do not want to face that. Our present concerns even run counter to what we should be doing (more electricity for our air conditioners in the summer and more heat for our houses in the winter).

So, we are in a tie. No one but the most partisan of us really cares about who the next President will be, at least between the two choices we have. George is not the brightest fellow to come along but Reagan wasn't either and we survived. Al is smarter but he does not inspire us with his personality.

I am really in an ideal situation just now. In addition to the physical move, I was reassigned to the customer service pool so I have a new boss also. The great thing about it is that I am the only one dealing with Internet services and my boss hasn't a clue about how that functions so she just leaves me almost completely alone. I am really doing the same thing I have done for more than a year but now there is no one monitoring me. All I really have to do is look busy and since looking busy means staring at a computer monitor all day that is not hard. No one has a clue about what I am really staring at. I actually do work, or what passes for work in the E age, but I could be playing video games all day and no one would really know.

I have heard about employees in large operations who were literally forgotten about. Passing through all of the changes that a business or bureaucracy goes through, they simply slipped off of the radar screens of management. They continue to get paid but as long as they don't call attention to themselves by asking for anything, they are just left alone. I may be in such a situation. It is a little boring to be out of the center of the action but it is also peaceful. I don't really do anything. I just make sure that other people are doing things. With email that has gotten to be a pretty simple matter, devoid of human contact. Clients call or email me asking for something, I pass on the request with as little human contact as I choose and then report back to the clients how things are going. If I want to, I can go a whole day without talking face to face with anyone.

I am not sure why I stopped my daily entries except that I just seemed to lose the urge. For a while, I actually felt guilty if I did not make a daily entry but the guilt went away.

A lot has happened in the last few months. For one thing, I made a quick trip to Oregon to visit my past and see the place where my mother's ashes are interred. I did not find my past, even though I walked the old neighborhood and visited a lot of places that were important to me growing up and so on. I guess in the end, our past and present are really the same thing. You never really go back in time. Our past is really one with what we are in the present.

When I walked the old neighborhood where I grew up; I started at the grade school that I attended from the 3rd through 8th grades. I walked the same streets, passed the same houses, stopped at a couple of the same little stores between the school and the location of the house where I grew up (the house is no longer there, having been torn down many years ago to make room for a bank). I expected to feel like the pre-adolescent kid who walked that way so many times, but I did not. True, some of the memories of that time came back and some of the feeling. But, the 9-year-old and the 56-year-old are the same person. I did not feel 9 again. I felt like the 56 year old walking a familiar path.

Frank lived for many years in a very small trailer that he had moved to the lot. He later built a one room dwelling (it would be a great exaggeration to call it a house). There was, I assume a bathroom in his dwelling and I assume some sort of kitchen, but it was all contained within the space of a small living room.

Frank had no last name that I ever heard. He was just referred to a Frank. Frank kept very much to himself. I would occasionally see him walking to and from his digs and I assume that he had a job somewhere in town but I never knew what he did. Frank was never seen outside when he was home and the only way you knew he was there was seeing him through his one large window. He never cut any of the weeds around the place.

When my grandfather was alive, he occasionally spoke to Frank but my grandmother never did except to say hello to him when she was in the yard and he walked by. Hello was the total extent of any conversation between them. I don't remember speaking to him except once. I was staying with my grandmother one summer after my grandfather's death and Frank stopped one day on his way into the dwelling. He told me that he watched out for my grandmother and to tell her to that if she ever needed anything to just come over. He had no phone so she could not call him. As far as I know, she never did go over.

Frank had no car. He always walked everywhere. His one luxury was a television set and you could sometimes see him on what I assume was his couch and bed watching TV. Frank never seemed to have any noticeable visitors. He seemed totally content with his solitary life.

Now, what will this poor creature make of the fact that everyone on a given flight seems to have paid a different price for his/her ticket? Will it be assumed that there was some special status accorded the $200 dollar ticket holder verses his seatmate who paid $600 for the same journey? Will our hapless space traveler conclude that one bought during a more favorable phase of the moon than the other did? Perhaps one owned a piece of the airline? Perhaps one was a criminal and was being punished with his higher priced ticket?

I am going to Oregon for a short visit in a couple of weeks. By some slightly convoluted scheduling and by flying north and east first before I get a plane that goes west, I got a fare of $270. The next best fare, which was more rational in terms of basically heading west the whole time, was nearly $400. These fares were actually much lower than I had been quoted online just a week earlier. United, after offending half of the flying public, is trying to buy back customers and has cut the rates. All of the other airlines naturally followed and the fare fell about $200 almost overnight. Now, of course if I were to need to get there tomorrow and buy my ticket today, the fare would be 3 to 4 times as much. I once needed to change a return ticket and the airline wanted $400 to move up my return even though they assured me there was plenty of room on the flight I was trying to change to.

I guess I have lived in a city too long that is relatively compact and for the most part is laid out on a true North/South, East West Grid. With few exceptions, the North/South streets are all number designated and the East/West are named streets. The arterial streets are also fairly straight. The main street in town is the North/South divider and it is pretty obviously the "main" street. There are no major bodies of water or hills in the way to screw up the plan. The main street is in fact the longest straight street in the country. It is so long (it extends into the country on either side of town where it becomes a highway) that there are several points where it is shifted just a bit to account for the global meridian which is of course a curved line.

The worst I think I ever got lost was in Tallahassee Florida. Somehow I got a map in my head that did not agree with the physical map. I remember looking at the physical map several times and it seemed the same as my head map. I still ended up getting lost. Finally I sat down with the physical map and studied it very carefully. I remember a sudden strange sensation as I was staring at the map, something like my eyes shifting in my head. I was so convinced that I was right that my mind was adjusting my perception of the map to what it thought it should look like, not what it actually read. I was creating a kind of optical illusion.

Perhaps we have made a big mistake. If they could just get together on a few issues, a Liberman, Cheney ticket might be pretty good. I know Cheney has a pretty conservative record but maybe the old conservatism is really dead, as is the old liberalism.

We have been pretty lucky with the last three VPs to replace a sitting President. Truman was an excellent President. Johnson before he got bogged down in Vietnam did a lot of great things. Ford was a soothing healer after the traumas of Watergate.

With the possible exception of George Bush Senior's Mister Potato Head and Nixon's corrupt bulldog, Agnew, the presidential candidates in the last sixty years or so have made some excellent choices for running mates.

According to Frixos Tombolis, vice-chairman of Westminster's (London) transportation and highways committee, "This is an innovative approach to the age-old problem of pollution, particularly on the curbside. If they prove to be a viable option for Westminster they could prove to be a cost-free way of reducing pollution, not penalizing car drivers or business."

I seem to remember a similar idea that was tested in California. Some sort of device was attached to car radiators. When heated by the hot air coming off of the radiator, they caused a chemical reaction that broke down the nitrous oxides in a similar manner. Each car in effect became an air-cleaning device, returning cleaner air to the environment than the air that passed through the radiator. The device, as I remember, was entirely passive, no moving parts, nothing to break down.

My daughter has sent through a list of things to bring. Guess she still needs us for some things.

I remember my grandmother used to bring a big trunk of things when she and my grandfather came to visit. Among the thing she brought along were towels, sheets and toilet paper. We were not rich but we certainly had spares of those items. It used to tick my mother off a bit but she never said anything. I guess it was a habit of my grandmother's left over from another time when she used to visit relatives and they did not always have extra bedding, towels, etc.

My daughter's list is more mundane, although it does include a request for her bank statements and a special light bulb for her desk lamp. Dad will also be bringing some cables and new software to try to get my daughter's printer working. Modern father's have special technical responsibilities.

It will be a good visit. My daughter is still glad to see us. The odd thing is that she will be home next weekend for a mid semester break anyway.

I remember well the first debate, between Kennedy and Nixon. Much is made of the way Nixon looked but I have always thought that Kennedy won just by showing up. It put him on an equal footing with the much better known Nixon. Kennedy carried himself well and seemed very confident. This debate would seem to be critical in the same way for Bush. He must come across as confident and knowledgeable. If he does not, Gore will win the debate.

What will be fun is all of the analysis afterward. Each side will claim that their man won or at least gained something. I love the so-called Spin-Doctors. They always seem so sure of themselves and their ability to ignore the truth is amazing.

I will probably not watch the full debate unless it gets really interesting. I have alas already made up my mind. It would take something pretty startling to change my mind now.

Pepsi is a big cat. He weighs over 20 pounds. He is not fat, just solid and muscular. He has a very shiny coat and is generally a handsome dude.

Pepsi, despite being neutered before he was a year old, is a very aggressive Tom. Half of the cats in the city would by now be his descendents if he were capable of passing on his genes. Any cat that gets near what he defines as his territory is in trouble, or least was until a couple of weeks ago. It seems that Pepsi finally met his match and he got a couple of severe lacerations on his forehead. They became infected and he had to have surgery to remove a couple of abscess that developed.

After the surgery, my wife and I were supposed to flush the wounds twice a day. That turned out to be an impossibility between his strength and my wife's aversion to cat blood. Fortunately, he healed anyway and the wounds have nearly closed. Once the hair grows back on his forehead, he should look like his old self.

Counting the cost of this injury, his shots over the years and a dislocated hip he somehow got about six years ago, Pepsi the free cat, has cost us over a thousand dollars. Like the free lunch, there are no free pets.

Thursday, September 28, 2000

OFF HIATUS

Ah, the pure power of fear……

Wednesday, September 6, 2000

A HIATUS

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there.
Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live,
And could not spare any more time for that one.

Thursday, August 31, 2000

MARBLE PALACES

So, I am glad that we are preserving the old stations. They are important for their architectural history and as a reminder of our past. I am glad, however, that I do not have to use them to travel. Airports and airlines for all of our complaining are really much better.

Wednesday, August 30, 2000

GO BIG RED OBSESSION

So, put on your red shirt, red shoes, red pants and red hat and come join us in our tribal ritual on Saturday. It is really a pretty amazing obsession. But, don't expect to be able to buy a ticket for the game at the box office. All of the games have been sold out for years.

Tuesday, August 29, 2000

ODD BITS